Aug 10
13
Recently, I was having coffee with a friend of mine when I was approached by a person sitting near us. He’d overheard us talking about some of the differences between Marketing, Sales, and Business Development and was curious about our topic of discussion.
It turned out that he was the owner of a local company that was struggling with sales and adding to the prospect base. I asked him what he was doing to fine tune his Business Development efforts to channel more sales to his various vertical markets. Initially I was met with a blank stare, and then a very uncomfortable if not weak response, “Our marketing department is on this.”
We talked a little more and I came to realize he’d let his Biz Dev efforts fall off over the past few years; not because he didn’t think it was important, but because he was channeling more money into marketing and selling to a diminishing customer base. There wasn’t a real effort, with the exception of some print advertising, to generate targeted new leads.
I told him that I was of the opinion that Business Development operations within a company are like a high-performance car, they require constant maintenance to stay in perfect working order. Just like in sales, a business needs to have the metrics in place to see how it’s business development efforts are paying off.
A little more discussion revealed that his sales team had challenges prospecting, there was no real contact management system in place, and they didn’t have a lot of tools in place to help them be more successful in garnering new business. I came to realize that this is an all too common occurrence when business achieve early success; sales people can fast become order takers and not prospecting machines.
My advice to him was simply to revisit the basics that got his company off the ground, look at a good CRM system, and develop a strategy for hunting out new business instead of waiting for it to come to him. That and I told him to call me!